Overture
Seven years ago I published a post about the price of LEGO and it changed my life. That piece was the culmination of months of research, data collection, analysis and writing. In that seven years, I have drafted a few follow-up posts, the most ambitious of which was a multi-year project tracking the secondary market of LEGO and identifying patterns which could be used to maximize return on investment.
Within the AFOL community there is a controversial subgroup that is focused on buying up new sets, holding onto them and selling them to nostalgic fans down the road (often times at 2x+ what they paid for it). On one hand, they can make new popular sets harder to find, on the other hand, LEGO is mass produced and many sets have limited releases anyway so for those who missed the release window, the secondary market may be the only place to find the set.
This community, which is mostly on Bricklink, has become such an integral part of the community that LEGO decided to buy the market place last year. This marketplace (and others) is not only a critical resource for buying discontinued sets, but also individual, hard to find, bricks that can be used to create anything you can imagine. The secondary market is an essential element to LEGO’s continued popularity and success.
Opportunity
So what have I been doing in those seven years besides not sharing the secret to riches in the LEGO investment game?
The post about LEGO opened up many opportunities for me. After I published the post, it took off like wildfire. Half a million views in the first year and many people reaching out to me for more information. One person wanted to meet me in person–I wasn’t doing much at the time, so I figured why not? That meeting turned into an interview which turned into a job offer with relocation to the bay area. Not knowing what I was doing, I bumbled my way into B2B marketing, specifically operations and then demand gen which I have doing as my day job for all those years.
However more importantly, if it wasn’t for my move to the bay area, I wouldn’t have met my wife and have a wonderful baby boy. One of the few highlights of 2020.
History
Last year, I lost both of my grandmothers, it was not a great year for me, however it created a sense of urgency to capture the lives of those past and the lives of those still here. For Christmas 2019, I gave my grandfather a microphone and a note saying that I wanted to capture his story. The plan was to break it into 4 segments: 1) Childhood, 2) WWII, 3) Parenthood, 4) Grandparenthood. I brought together all his grandchildren and we were able to get through the first two segments over two days. And then there was a pandemic. And then my wife and I had our first child.
Life got a little complicated, but if anything, having a child reignited my interest in a connection to my family history. It was important to me that our son could meet his great-grandpa, so we tool all the necessary COVID precautions in order to feel comfortable enough to visit him. When we went down for our first visit, I setup an old laptop at his house with simple instructions which allowed us to video chat multiple times a week.
We have only had the opportunity to visit twice this year due to the pandemic, but each time I have made it a priority to listen to and capture his stories as well as scan thousands old photos and documents. While I am home I spend some of my free time (which is more scarce these days), organizing and meticulously cataloging the scans. The deeper I got, the more I discovered that the operations and scripting skill set I had developed through work and my hobbies would be valuable to this new endeavor.
Postscript
Now that you are up to speed you are probably wondering if this is now genealogy blog?
It isn’t that simple.
While a lot of my focus today is on my family history, the way that often manifests is through over-engineered solutions to problems. This is not unique to my genealogy research and this is what this blog is about: Problem Solving.